Put eviland supercilious together and what do you get? “Parker Spitzer,” the new current-events program CNN is about to launch staring Eliot Spitzer, whose most elevated job was as a John, and Kathleen Parker, a pseudo-intellectual in the Peggy Noonan and David Brooks mode, also a member of the “Soft Left (otherwise known as Conservatives).”
This just goes to show that statists, and individuals with low moral character and banal ideas will always have a prime place on American TV and in its restricted market place of ideas.
The One and Only Glenn Beck, still a scrupulously good fellow despite fame and fortune, would contend that only G-d is great, and that’s what makes Mr. Beck so good.
His humility and love of grace aside, Glenn is one of the most important popular forces for liberty today.
Yes, he often gets it wrong. Yes, he often confuses genuine forces for liberty (Ron & Rand Paul, Peter Schiff) with snake-oil merchants (the neoconservatives Andrew Breitbart and Stephen Moore). Yes, he overestimates the wisdom of the American People, and never touches the topic which accounts for the future dissolution of the people and the election of another. (Embellish, if you will.)
BUT.
No one in mainstream media has done what Glenn has to drive home the reasons and consequences of an irrevocably insolvent America: the twin evils of monetary policy and mind-boggling state profligacy.
And no one, myself excluded, has come out swinging as Glenn has against the Meghan McCain phenomenon and what IT represents. Meghaaan’s delusions of grandeur are those of America’s miseducated, exceedingly arrogant, deeply dopey, utterly outsourceable youth, worshiped, nay deified, by parents and pedagogues (and slowly being displaced by Asia’s pleasant, wickedly hardworking, bright, respectful kids). Glenn hasn’t quite gotten there, but he’s almost there.
Today Glenn galvanized his comedic gifts to roast this fattened goose. Not one Republican has done so satisfactorily. Laura Ingraham practically apologized for lampooning Meghan McCains’s unmistakable moronity; Michelle Malkin also backed down from a less-than adequate evisceration. Coulter opted out as usual, and said nothing much important (as she does on immigration).
Reid Buckley on teaching a writing course to the functionally illiterate students in a run-of-the-mill American university:
“…These young people had not been taught to edit. They had not been taught self-criticism. They had been reared in an environment of self-esteem, even when this went unexamined and was unearned. And when they returned a week later with the fruits of their labors, I was appalled. I took the papers home and spent two afternoons and two evenings past midnight editing them.”
“I had to contend with an illiterate heaping of multisyllabic social-studies mush whose meaning was either obscured or contradicted by other heapings of academic mush, as indecipherable as they were ungrammatical. Illicit inferences lurked under false premises like salamanders under rocks. Logical connections did not exist. Non sequiturs were thick as chiggers. Do not mention grace or style. Of the 28 papers I labored through, only in two did I detect talent buried in the rubble. I had never seen anything so hopeless.”
“When I proceeded to go over the essay of another young man, his voice caught in his throat and he broke down. I was taken aback. We hadn’t proceeded beyond the first page. His wasn’t the worst effort, either. But he wasn’t protesting my criticisms. To the contrary. ‘You’re right,’ he kept repeating, tears flowing, ‘It’s awful. I can’t write my thoughts down. They come out a mess, I know!’ And then he related a scandal. Not in four years of high school and three years of college had a single teacher expressed concern about his writing or offered to edit it. When he said this, other students spoke out to confirm cognate experiences. ‘What can I do now?’ this young man asked me despairingly. ‘I graduate in two months!'”
“The dimensions of his doom and that of these other young people hit me with full force. Not once in their educational lives had they been taught to impose order on chaos, that being contrary to the central dogma of liberal-arts education in our country today. There is no such thing as choosing, as distinguishing between the false and the real, discriminating between good and bad. The cost of this heresy to our nation is beyond calculating: for two generations our businesses, professions, universities, and politics have been populated by moral illiterates who reject reason.”
“The art of writing is the soul of reason, from which all civilization has spun. If one cannot give expression to one’s thoughts, one is reduced to grunts. These young men and women were to be graduated in two months’ time. Yet they were functionally illiterate, as the saying goes—a hideous euphemism for being thrust into the adult world intellectually crippled. Several other students who crowded around me now claimed that never had they had their written work reviewed. I was incredulous. “Never?” “Not once!” came their reply…”
[SNIP]
Do read “The Write Stuff.” It’s a tad overwritten, in my opinion. Reid, moreover, fails to distinguish between the problem of functional illiteracy and the blight of postmodern writing. The two are distinct, with some overlap. In all, the extent of the horror of the betrayal of generations of students by pedagogues cannot be repeated often enough. Kids don’t deserve this.
Update (August 26): Edmund Burke: “Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” (From “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”Vol. iii. p. 335.)
Kim Karsashian appeared on Sean Hannity’s ostensible news hour, and was praised by the anchor as a role model for “young girls” (read: budding sluts). With reference to this not unfamiliar sight on FoxNews, Richard Spencer, editor of Taki’s Magazine, Writes: “After this, Sean might wanna make some personnel changes in his Research department.” I think not. Has any one seen “the succession of vacuous, narcissistic, pig-ignorant panelists paraded on Sean Hannity’s ‘Great American Panel‘”? The cheap and nasty looking Kim Karsashian belongs on FoxNews, alongside that cable channel’s anchor ladies, and its chosen bimbo commentators who dress and behave a little like Karsashian.
For example, Geraldo is especially attached to a psychologist—a buxom, surgically altered, grotesque blond, who was once a playmate pinup. O’Reilly makes a mockery of the already ridiculous culture-warrior concept by dragging onto the set a very eager, slutty, East-European Internet exhibitionist to impart her “knowledge” of the English language, no less.
The girl on the screen could have been a Fox News anchorwoman, although she was by far prettier and less vulgar looking than the coarse loudmouths, whose lipstick-dripping mouths deliver, in fog-horn decibels, slogans like: “We Report, You Decide” and “Fair and Balanced.”
Appearing on “Your World” with Neil Cavuto, porn star Sunrise Adams attempted, rather touchingly, to play down her cheap hooker looks and sorry syntax with a pair of nerdy spectacles. But while she used the standard, dizzy, woman’s magazine self-realization routine to describe her occupation—“this is a pastime for me. This is just something for me to do and enjoy and to grow with”—it was her host, Cavuto, who was responsible for rolling out the welcoming waterbed for the porn star and her pimp, Steve Hirsch, co-founder of Vivid Entertainment.
But Fox is “sexing up” more than just news. It’s customary to see the skanky Jamison as a commentator on the E! Networks programs, but the news cable networks, with Fox in the lead, are not far behind. These faux-conservatives are certainly helping to mainstream society’s more dubious members. The class act that is Martha Stewart, for instance, is routinely derided on Fox. Their choice of ‘Lifestyle Guru’? The rotting flesh that is Gene Simmons of the band ‘Kiss.'”
FoxNews is full of big, mediocre egos who feel good around pea-brained, Jenna-Jamison lookalikes.
Update (August 24): Conservatives never tire of touting Miley Cyrus as another example of wholesomeness. They were furious with me for suggesting, in “Bomb Them With Bimbos,” that Miley Cyrus be exported to China:
What an excellent preemptive strike that would be. You just know that before long we’re going to be forced to partake in the awakening of yet another vacuous narcissist who flaunts her character flaws, and other folds, before millions of video voyeurs. A Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan in the making.
Admittedly, I know very little about “Hannah Montana” and her handlers. What I’ve seen of the overbearing, extremely precocious, brassy, and not very bright Miley Cyrus doesn’t conjure the “wholesome” descriptive. When I think of “wholesome,” I think of, say, Martina McBride. Miley in various states of undress, nestled in the arms of father Billy Ray Cyrus, gazing at him seductively—this may be cringe-making, but not surprising.
As for the whole blame Dad and Disney thing: Adopted by left and right alike, the paternalistic depiction of women as passive agents, demeaned by male-driven appetites, is feminist fiction. Miley Cyrus may be 15, but she’s a single-minded exhibitionist, propelled by the fame thing. She’s been raised like that. In all likelihood, Miley originated the idea of posing for Vanity Fair and would not stop pestering pappy until he relented. The typical American parent treats his teenager like a Delphic oracle. Any parent who has such a demigod under construction knows I’m right.
Those who persist in the he-done-me-wrong routine don’t have teenagers. Or are oblivious to the reversal in parent-child roles that has come to typify the dynamics in the American family.
In any event, as Lou Dobbs often exhorts, it’s time to get tough on China. I say let’s get dirty. Export Miley to China. What better way to addle the young minds of the competition?”
CHECK OUT this soft porn, suggestive, father-daughter tease. Tender, isn’t it? (NOT: this is twisted):
